My BA flight

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My worst experience so far with any airline

Friday 17/12/2010
I have booked a flight month ago to travel to my parents for Christmas with BA from Heathrow T5. Thankfully there were no crew strikes this time but there was bad weather. I arrived at the airport in time. While I was waiting to drop-off my bag it was announced that due to the high number of cancellations there is no rebooking facility in the terminal. I dropped-off my luggage and went for shopping. At that time my flight was OK. I was waiting for the gate number. The loud-speakers were constantly announcing that we should go to gate A11 if our international flight got cancelled and leave the terminal. Very well, I felt lucky that I am not hit with these issues but suddenly when my gate number supposed to be announced a new information got displayed: "Enquire at the airline"
OK, so what does it mean? Is it cancelled? If not, why to go to that 4 desks in the middle of the terminal to queue there, instead just write delayed? If yes, why not write that information? This is the first sign of the communication hell which followed. Anyway I went to those desks from where the display is no longer visible so if it has changed I would not had known. Queued for about 20 minutes and I got finally the bad news that my flight is cancelled. I started to fume about the process but I had little idea that this is the least of my problem.
OK, now it is cancelled time to get to gate A11. I went there straight but realized that a queue formed around the terminal while I was waiting at the BA desks. I could not believe my eyes. There were I do not know how much flight cancelled but BAA only opened one gate to get back to the arrival area to get back our luggage. (Well done BAA.)
Finally I am in the reclaim area. (Went through the border control, saw many people to queue at additional BA desks where there was no chance that they got service before those desks closes at 22:30.) I was waiting in the area for hours but my bag just did not show. (The crowd increased so one could barely move.)
The system which supposed to tell us where to go for our luggage only showed "please wait" and on the side panel it was written that for cancelled flights go to reclaim 9. After spending some time there I went back and noticed that at the crowd level (hardly visible) there was a hand written additional information that reclaim 7-8 are also in use. After 2 hours of waiting the loud-speaker started to announce certain flights at certain conveyor belts. No luck here as my flight was never announced. I started to lose my temper. Anger was growing around me due to lack of communication. People were crying realizing that they are not going to be able to spend the Christmas were they planned it.
It was still just the beginning.
The loud-speaker started to announce that we should leave the terminal and get back tomorrow. I talk to some member of the stuff. They were giving us contradicting information. There was absolute chaos there. Queues are terminal long so I decided to leave as advised. Luckily for me I leave in London so I had somewhere to go back.
I was given a paper about my rights that BA will pay certain costs and I should rebook either through their web site or calling their number. Of course this all was useless information because I had no access to Internet at the airport and their phone lines were all busy. So far customer service is a big fat 0.
I have to mention here also that BAA stuff was highly unprofessional. Many people were frustrated and of course they were trying to went it to whoever they could. The way BAA people handled the situation made things only worth. E.g When someone asked after giving him the standard pre-printed information about how to rebook the guy asked back if they have tried to actually call the number they advertise. The answer was "I am not flying". It might be funny from their point of view but it just set off the person who was already frustrated at the handling of the situation. I think if people are trained better an answer like "yes, we know it is extremely busy please try again", etc. would have been a lot better response and would not cause further tension.
I went home to try to arrange something over the Internet. Well, it turns out that I cannot rebook my ticket because the type of ticket I bought is not changeable. Their system was crashing but more or less functional. A new ticket cost around 10 times more than the original I bought. This is good business for BA. Let's cancel the flight and get the guys buy new tickets for 10 times higher price. Of course as their lines are all busy there is no one to turn for clarification how it supposed to go. Hopefully they would refund it but without confirmation I did not risk such transaction.
I decided that I will go with Wizzair because they were running the service all day with delays unlike BA who decided to cancel everything. It set back me with additional 200 GBP but what can I do? I booked a flight for the next night leaving me some time to get back my luggage the next morning. At that time I was still optimistic. What a mistake.
So now the backup route prepared, exhausted but nerveous I tried to get some rest before I go back the Heathrow and attempt to get back my luggage.
Saturday 18/12/2010
I did not manage to sleep more than 2 hours. At 5 AM I was back at the airport. First I tried to see and sort out my booking but the queue at that time was around 12 hours long filling up zone F and G.
So I talked to the person behind me and ask her kindly to reserve my place while I go down for my luggage. Again I was optimistic but I was wrong again.
At the ground level a small queue were already waiting at the stuff entrance to get back to the reclaim area. Till 7 nothing happened. (BA customer service "visible" again.) Finally at around 7 they started to plan some kind of approach how to handle us. They started to call people for certain plains and let them through security 5 at a time. I should not mention that chaos descended right away. Why is my flight not called, etc. Of course no communication about other flights, etc. Again frustration started to grow to a level were police had to show up. Somehow someone had an idea to decrease the security off the reclaim area and let us through without security check in a quicker more efficient way. I was a bit puzzled that what if I am in and my luggage is not there? What is the point letting me in, if the thing I am after is not there. But again, I think I am asking too much from BA and BAA to organize it better.
So about 5 hours of waiting paid of and I was in again at the reclaim area.
The area was filled with luggage from all kinds of flights. People were trying to go around them and find their bags. I did the same. (Again BAA stuff were highly professional "I am not BA."). I asked a BA stuff again where can I find the bags from my flight. Of course it was on the other side of the terminal (reclaim 3) while I was at reclaim 9. Never the less I went through all the luggage on my way from one end till the other. No luck so around reclaim 3 I asked again a member of the stuff. The answer was reclaim 8. OK. So now go back again from end to end but without luck second time. I went to a 3rd member of the stuff and asked for information about my flight. I was sent around for the 3rd time but I told him that I do not see any point in it as I have checked everything twice. He said that it is possible that bags are still not on display here because of the quantity involved. If I want to know where is my bag I should queue at the baggage desks. I should not even mention that the queue was again from one end to the other and I had a flight to catch in the afternoon from Luton so I could not stay any longer and I had to leave.
Just when I get back home an update mentioned that now the destination airport is closed so my flight is cancelled. From BA I got text message as well as email about the cancellation but I could not do anything with the information as their system was not prepared for rebooking. In Wizzair's case no message was sent but their web site got the relevant information up-to-date and the moment my flight appeared with cancelled label a rebook link also appeared. What a surprise! I went there and I managed to rebook for Tuesday without much hassle. (No tickets were available for Sunday or Monday.) At least there is a company whose system is prepared for dealing with their "own" failure to provide the service they supposed to give.
I did not see any point going back to Heathrow so I stayed at home and waited till Sunday.
Sunday 19/12/2010
Sunday came and I went back to get back my luggage again. This time because it is lost to me I needed some kind of paper work from BA for my insurance company. Interestingly desks were open at the stuff entrance and BA people were dealing with the clients. Too bad that they could not do it on Friday to handle the crowd. Anyway after 1-2 hours of waiting I got my response that my luggage is in the system in a part of the terminal from where they are not going to give it back to me. The only document they could gave to me is a hand written file number which gives me access in their system to track my luggage.
While on Friday, Saturday and Sunday BA was cancelling flight I have to mention that Luton which is on higher ground than Heathrow was functional except the heavy snow fall on Saturday.

I understand that BA has no control over the weather. I understand that there are a lot of customers involved but in my view this company should not run business like this. If they are not able to take of their customers in such a situation they should be stopped selling that many tickets.
I work in IT and in the financial sector. We have to have disaster recovery system in place to deal with any kind of outage because we have to provide our financial figures on time. BA in my view has not got the right system (like Wizzair had it) so you cannot simply rebook and does not has the right infrastructure to deal with such a load. This happened last year and it seems this company does not learn from its mistakes. Currently BA's web site completely down. Have these guys never heard of Amazon's or Salesforce's cloud solutions? (For those who are not familiar with the concept, these companies runs hundreds of servers and a customer's system can scale automatically and run on one server and as the load increases other servers will join and share the work load so the system remains available.)

For those who are interested a little bit more insight into the issue and how people were treated:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-12031523
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-12036189
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-12037468

Further updates:
22/12/2010
The luggage was forwarded to the destination airport.
23/12/2010
The bag was handed over for delivery to another company. No word so far from them and today is 24th.
I tried to call BA's number a thousand times but it was never answered. Always busy. On 24th the answer is different. We are closed. It is such a good feeling that they have a nice Christmas while my one is ruined.
My Christmas presents are not going to be under the tree. And all because they decided not to give back the luggage at Heathrow.
Never again with these clowns.

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